Thagirion
by joudama
Summary: Instead of waiting to breed new Ancients, Hojo decides to simply create a new one from Aerith and a terrorist who remembers more than she should. AU; written for help japan.
1. Prologue

**Title:** Thagirion [序]

**Author:** joudama

**Fandom:** FF7 (AU)

**Status:** 1/3

**Rating:** R

**Word count: **2711

**Summary/Prompt:** Instead of waiting to breed new Ancients, Hojo decides to simply create a new one from Aerith and a terrorist who remembers more than she should.

**A/N:** This is for illumynare, who won my help_japan auction. :D She made an incredibly generous bid, and as someone actually living in Japan, I am extremely grateful. Also, I'd ask that if you enjoyed this fic, to please consider donating to $5 or so to a charity. It doesn't really matter which one, but it'd be a way for the spirit of help_japan-and all of the help_* auctions-to keep going.

This is an AU fic. I don't actually like writing AUs, believe it or not, but that's mainly because my internal nitpicker is kind of evil. This means that if I _do_ write an AU, I more write "butterfly effect"/"road not taken" style AUs, in which a single choice is made differently, and everything flows out from there. In this case, the "road not taken" comes from Tifa making a different decision in the hospital in Midgar than the one she actually made pre-game.

The prologue is written in a slightly unusual style for me; blame the Haruki Murakami influence (ahaha, oh _boy_, is there an influence). ^^;; There's a stylistic reason for it, though, and hopefully that will be clear by the time you get through the whole thing. There's a method to my madness, I promise. (Likewise, the titles and the epigraphs will all make a loooot more sense once the whole thing is finished. Method to my madness, honest.)

There are, duh, much more extended notes, but for the sake of brevity, I'm cutting them from the intros to the fic sections-if you're interested in all the influences (from Murakami to Japanese mythology to Kabbalah to the Qliphoth to numerology to Holocaust studies to a Finnish band), I'll be posting them separately later as an Ultimania. :D Also, thanks to peeka_cat for the beta! :D

Prologue [序]:

過去を書き換えれば

[If You Could Rewrite the Past]

「あなたは過去を書き換えたい？」  
>「君は過去を書き換えたくない？」<br>彼女は首を振った。「私は過去だとか、歴史だとか、そんなものを書き換えたいとはちっとも思わない。私が書き換えたいのはね、今ここにいる現在よ」  
><em>-<em>村上春樹、_1Q84 Book 1_

-.

The day her father dies is the day Nibelheim burns to the ground.

-.

The day Nibelheim burns to the ground is the day Tifa Lockheart almost dies.

She knows how close she's come when she opens her eyes and wishes very much that she hadn't, because with consciousness comes _pain_.

"Don't move, child," Zangan says quickly, and casts Cure on her...and it isn't enough. Cure was usually more than good enough for training injuries, and the way the Cure feels like it has barely made a dent in the _wrongness_ of her stomach tells her how close she must have been to dying-and still is.

Her stomach is bandaged, the vest she had been wearing gone and the rest of her clothes are stained with dried blood, and she wonders for a moment what had happened to her hat before the pain makes her drift out again.

-.

When she opens her eyes and can at last _keep_ them open, Zangan is nowhere to be seen. There is only an older woman, plump and greying, checking the contents of the IV in Tifa's arm.

"Zangan-" Tifa tries to say, but "Dad-" comes out instead, and she remembers, horribly, the last time she had seen her father. She pushes the image of his broken body away as quickly as she can, before she can think about it more and remember more than that involuntary flash before her eyes of her father on the ground. Now isn't the time, not yet, and if she dares think about it for even an instant, she'll be in tears. "My teacher...the one who brought me...where?" she says, feeling stupid and confused and desperate. She doesn't even know where she is, let alone where her teacher is.

What she does know, however, is that her father is dead. The one thing she wishes she didn't know, she knows all too well.

The nurse is kind, in her way. "You're in a hospital in Midgar. You had a pretty near-miss, but you'll be OK now."

"Where is-where is Zangan? The man who brought me here?"

The nurse frowns. "I'm not sure, honey. You've been here a good few weeks now. No one's been in to see you," the nurse says with a pitying smile.

Never in her life has Tifa felt so alone.

She feels the tears coming, and she doesn't try to stop them at all when the nurse leaves to get a doctor.

She wouldn't have been able to stop them anyway.

-.

She cries every night for the next week-crying for her father, for her home, and for herself.

-.

They have told her she can leave soon; that she will be well enough to go in maybe another week or so. It took her a long time to recover, even with the Cures-Zangan's had held her together, but it took _time_ for the body to recover. Cures may have seemed like magic, but they weren't-they were just hitting a Haste on the body's healing itself, and too much would exhaust you. It was a price you paid later, when you finally got to rest and you slept like the dead and when you woke up you ate everything in sight.

She had known the day was coming, but...but she hadn't wanted to think about, or had even been able to think about it-about what she would do when she left. But now, laying in the hospital bed with nothing, she realizes that soon she can go...but has nowhere to go _to_.

She realizes, then, that she has two choices-she can stay in Midgar, alone, and try to rebuild herself and her life and hope to somehow find Cloud in this city, or she can go after Zangan.

The sting from being left-being _abandoned_-makes tears prickle at her eyes, and she blinks quickly to stop them, and looks out the window, seeking a distraction.

There is no sky here-only the dark, metallic plate and the artificial lights mimicking the sun, and in a flash, rage fills her.

ShinRa built that-ShinRa. A company so drunk on itself and caring so little about people that they blocked out the sun. It makes her feel sick. Her stomach clinches, and pain flares through her.

She hasn't healed, not completely, and it almost feels like she never will, that her belly and her heart will always ache like this.

There is a knock on the door, and a nurse, the one from the day she woke up, comes in, carrying a small bag. "Feeling any better?" she asks, and Tifa gives a faint nod as she tries to compose her face.

"I asked around a bit," the nurse says brightly, and Tifa stares at her blankly. "About the person who brought you here. He apparently left this for you before he left," she says, and hands the bag to Tifa.

As soon as it is in her hands, Tifa begins to shake, and she clutches it to her tightly. It is something _real_; something there and something solid. She does not know what to do, or where to go, or how she will survive.

She's never been alone before, and pain expands in her chest. Everything she had, everything she knew, everything she loved, is gone, and she has no idea what to do.

Something twists; the pain morphs into something far more comfortable, something that she is more familiar with, and reaches for-anger. The things in her life are not _gone_; they were _taken_. They were stolen away from her, and that anger intermingles with the feeling of loss, and her loneliness is at the core of it.

She decides, then, what she has to do-go after Zangan, beg him to-_please, don't leave me alone_-teach her more, just a bit _more_, until she can stand on her own and take ShinRa down for what they have stolen away from her.

She doesn't want to be alone, and this is all she has left.

-.

She leaves before the doctors want her to, but she knows the longer she stays, the harder it will be for her to find Zangan, and the easier it will be to just stay in ShinRa's city.

She had once dreamed about going to Midgar-Midgar was this magical place, the _big city_, larger than life and far larger than her tiny little home, but now, the longer she stays, the sicker she feels and the more she longs to be _anywhere_ else-to see with her own eyes what ShinRa has done to her home, to _know_. The decision to go, to find Zangan and beg him to teach her, has made her hate being here and hate everything it means, and hate Midgar with every passing instant. She decided to go, and go she _will,_ and the longer she stays, the more angry she becomes at the injury keeping her here, and at ShinRa.

And so she leaves that night, when it still hurts her to walk.

She is fine with that, because it reminds her how weak she still is, and how much she still has to learn, and how much there still is for Zangan to teach her. She vows, disgusted with herself, that she will never be in this weak position again.

And she vows that one day, she will return to Midgar. She will return, and destroy it, the same as ShinRa destroyed her home, raze it somehow until there is nothing of ShinRa left.

And so she leaves, with nothing but a small bag, of things Zangan had left for her before he left, and that gives her the courage to go look for him-he has left her, but not completely abandoned her, and she will take that tiny sliver of something. She doesn't have enough for what she knows will be terrifyingly high medical bills, so she leaves before she can even be told of them, and she almost feels guilty about it when she slips out in the middle of the night through a window. If she were staying in Midgar, she would have found a job, found some way to pay for the procedures and efforts that saved her life. But she is _not_ staying and this is ShinRa's town; she owes none of them _anything_, because she never should have been there to begin with.

The night is warm, and she lets out a breath of relief when she is out from under the Plate and the moon and stars are finally overhead.

And then, with a small look back at ShinRa's proud city of lights and Plates and _rot_, a city that stands while her home is nothing but ruins of ash, she takes off away at a run, and runs until she bleeds.

-.

It takes her two months to find Zangan. He is far from Midgar, far from the entire Visgrad region, further south than she has ever been in her life. It is hard for her to bear, this heat even so late in the year when the leaves should be beginning to turn red and the air should have an arid nip, and half the time she feels as if the weight of this air, laden with humidity like a storm that never comes, will suffocate her.

She hates it here, and it makes the joy she feels at finding Zangan-at finding something that is _familiar_-all the stronger.

She had thought, when she saw him, that her first words would be "Long time no see, Master Zangan," not the blurted and _young,_ "Why did you leave me?" that they are, and she would be ashamed of them were she not so angry and desperate. She doesn't understand why he left her, why she could not have waited until she was awake, even as she clutched the bag he had left her every night when she slept. It had been both a life line and a weight: he had left her, but he had also left her this. She had thought she was fine, but when she lays eyes on, the relief is almost instantly tainted with all the feelings of abandonment she has denied until that moment.

Instantly eyes are on them, and Zangan, after a moment of surprise that is masked almost too fast for Tifa to identify, shakes his head.

"Not here, come with me," he says quickly, and leads her to the quiet square in the middle of this humid town, and they sit beneath a tree that offers a blessed bit of shade.

Now, Zangan looks at her, and his shoulders slump and his eyes close for an instant before he smiles. "I knew you'd be all right. You're a tough girl. You wouldn't die so easily."

She had always been proud when Zangan would smile at her, but now it makes her angry. "How did you know? You just left me!" she says.

"Because I knew you'd live," he says flatly, and Tifa wonders what kind of answer that is supposed to be.

"_How_ was I supposed to live? I survived, but...what am I supposed to _do_?"

He gave her a hard look, one with a touch of disgust. He had given her that look sometimes in training, when she would falter and complain, at the beginning, that it was too much, and on some level, it shames her.

"You are alive, more than can be said for many," he says, and she is stung. "Surviving is one thing, but now is the hard part. And you can do it."

"How?" she says, needing an answer. The only answer she has for herself is to grow stronger, to fight, but now, with Zangan so cold, she has no idea what to do.

"Why did you come after me?" he asks, and she knows before she can ask that he is going to deny her. Zangan only teaches the students he choses, and she can tell, by the way he speaks, by the shuttered look on his face, that he is going to tell her _no, _and seeing that route crumble before her eyes sends waves of panic through her_._

"What do you mean, 'why'? What else _could_ I have done?" she says desperately. "Where else could I have gone?"

Zangan sighs.

"You could have stayed in Midgar and built a new life there. I took you there for a reason, because it was so big that it would be easier for you to live unnoticed there. You could slip into a new life."

"I don't want a new life!" she yells. "ShinRa took my life! They took away my home, they took away my life! They took everything I had away from me!" she says, and the rage was all she had left. "How am I supposed to just start a new life and let them get away with this!"

When Zangan speaks, the words strike her to her core.

"Forget this, Tifa Lockheart. You are strong, girl, but even you are not as strong as this," Zangan says, and there is something oddly sad in his voice. Zangan is usually so strong, and so defiant, that hearing the defeated tone he uses is a shock. "Your old life is gone, and there is nothing you can do about it. Vanish somewhere and never speak of Nibelheim again. Do this, if you wish to live."

"But-" she begins, and Zangan's words silence her again.

"Do you forget I am from _Wutai_, child?" he says sharply. "I could tell you the names of many places in Wutai that no longer exist, but were at least granted to right to have _once_ existed. But the place where I was born..." He falls silent for a long moment before he speaks again. "There is a reason why I wander the world teaching. It is because my home is a place that according to ShinRa never existed; a village that never existed so it was never razed to the ground and its inhabitants never slaughtered because they were never born. I am from _nowhere_ because it is a 'nowhere' that was erased from history and the world, and I wander because my home is a place that existed yet never did. I wander and teach all that remains of a school that was never developed at a monastery that never was in a place that never existed."

Tifa falls silent, stunned, and Zangan turns away, scanning the horizon. "I've wasted enough time here and it is not safe for me to stay in a single place too long. The same is true for you," he says and gives her a sharp, pointed stare. "Especially if you dare to remember. Go," he ends, the word like a punch, and all Tifa can manage is a soft whisper that is pathetic and desperate even to her own ears.

"I'm not strong enough," she says. "Take me with you. Teach me. _Please_," she says, and after what feels like too long, Zangan's shoulders slump and he nods.

Relief floods through her, and when he turns to walk away and gestures over his shoulder for her to follow, she does.

_-._

_"You want to rewrite the past?"  
><em>_"You _don't_ want to?  
><em>_She shook her head. "Not even in the slightest. I don't want to rewrite the past, or history, or any of that. What I'd want to rewrite is where I am now. The present."_

_-Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Book 1_


	2. One Set of Memories

**Title:** Thagirion [上]

**Author:** joudama

**Fandom:** FF7 (AU)

**Status:** 2/4

**Rating:** R

**Word count: **7,000ish

**Summary/Prompt:** Instead of waiting to breed new Ancients, Hojo decides to simply create a new one from Aerith and a terrorist who remembers more than she should.

**A/N:** This is for illumynare, who won my help_japan auction. :D She made an incredibly generous bid, and as someone actually living in Japan, I am extremely grateful. Also, I'd ask that if you enjoyed this fic, to please consider donating to $5 or so to a charity. It doesn't really matter which one, but it'd be a way for the spirit of help_japan-and all of the help_* auctions-to keep going.

For the sake of brevity, I'm cutting out the extensive author's notes I actually wrote for this-if you are interested, I'll be posting them separately, as an Ultimania. :D I also broke the story into four sections - the prologue and three chapters - instead of the original planned two sections (...then three sections...) for the sake of brevity and to ensure these came out with more frequency. ^^;;

And remember, this is an AU, so the characters and a lot of situations are different - I write 'butterfly effect' AUs, and this is one of them. Everything will become clear in the next part, when I do more filling in. Promise. XD

.-

Part I [上]:

ひとつの記憶

[One set of memories]

_.- _

「あいつらはね、忘れることができる」とあゆみは言った。「でもこっちは忘れない」

「もちろん」と青豆は言った。

「歴史上の大量虐殺と同じだよ」

「大量虐殺？」

「やった方は適当な理屈をつくて行為を合理化できるし、忘れてもしまえる。見たくないものから目を背けることもできる。でもやられた方は忘れない。目も背けられない。記憶は親から子へ受け継がれる。世界というのはね、青豆さん、ひとつの記憶とその反対側の記憶との果てしない闘いなんだよ。」

_-_村上春樹、_1Q84 Book 1_

.-

_Three years ago_

_.- _

"Please...please, just make it _stop_. I'll tell you _everything_, give you all the names I know, just make it _stop_!" the young woman said, sobbing.

Reno smiled. It was a large, broad smile, one that was more dangerous than the sobbing young terrorist - all bravado, no training - had any idea it was. Or rather, Rude thought, more dangerous than she had sneeringly _assumed_ it wasn't when she was brought in.

She was a small fish, they knew that, but even she had to know someone who could be of use - or, at least, know someone who would know someone who would be of use.

"Smart girl," Rude said softly. "The names. Now. And maybe you'll get to go home one day."

_An' maybe Odin'll come down and lay a big, wet kiss on my ass_, he could hear in his head, in Reno's voice.

The girl - just barely old enough to have had her Coming-of-Age, and that was what made this _work_ - looked at him for a split second before she dropped her eyes in shame, and started speaking through teary, exhausted gasps.

The funny thing about torture, Rude thought, was that normally, it didn't actually _work_. The real hardcore people, the zealots, they never snapped, no matter what you did. In, it tended to have the opposite effect, fed into their hate and feeling of being martyrs to the cause. Those type, they wouldn't say a damn thing, no matter what you did, and so they were the ones you just disappeared, drugged into stupors and threw into institutions, and once they started to fade from memory, made _sure_ they met with an ignoble accident, so any followers had nothing to rally around.

Then there were the ones you ran into the most. They weren't the true believers, even if they thought they were. They may have believed in whatever cause it was, or liked the paycheck, but oh, they did indeed start to talk once you got _serious_ and things started to hurt.

It's just that what they said often didn't amount to jack _squat _in terms of being true.

Some people - the vast majority - will, when they are in pain and you are causing it, will say whatever it is they think you want to hear to make it _stop_. They'd tell you their saintly grandmums were big criminal masterminds plotting the downfall of the Planet if that's what they thought you wanted. The vast majority of the time with torture, what you got wasn't enough to be worth anything-not unless it wasn't the _truth_ you were after you. It worked just fine for when you needed someone to scapegoat or needed an excuse, which meant anything dragged out of torture was just fine, because it fit the narrative you were weaving. Especially if that narrative wasn't exactly _true_. So those were the types you used when what you _needed_ wasn't necessarily something that had to be _true_.

_Then_ you shot them in the head. Because they were of no more use, and if gods forfend you turned them loose, they would take that shame at vomiting out whatever lies it took to make you stop hurting them, and turn it into hate, and end up either rabidly in the first group or making rabid _followers_ who'd go in the first group.

But then, there were people like this girl, the rarest of the lot. Young, stupid, and _naive_. Young enough to still think they were invincible, stupid enough to think they'd get out just fine somehow, and naive enough to not know to lie...and to believe that you weren't.

"There are...there are five people in my circle," she said, her voice teary. "Me, Angela McQueen, Jareth Renolds, Francis Ishimura, and Tifa Lockheart. Tifa...she works at this bar, Seventh Heaven, and that's where we all meet. I think, I think she's the one who does inter-circle communication because she's got run of the bar and it's a good place for people to go and not get attention drawn, and she's supposed to buy it or something soon so we really have a, a headquarters or something. Everyone was talking about the money for it, or something, I wasn't paying attention. Please," she said, breaking down again, "_Please _let me go home, I don't know anything else, I-" she began, and her voice cut off when Rude put his hand on her shoulder gently, and she looked up at him with large, pleading eyes before he swiftly and efficiently snapped the girl's neck.

Reno pulled out his PHS and began making calls as soon as it was done - they had to move fast before anyone in AVALANCHE found out one of their newest members (and they'd only found her because she had been young, and stupid, and had too big of a mouth) had been captured by the Turks.

In death, she looked even younger than her few years, and he took the briefest moment to close the girl's eyes before he made his own set of calls.

When he was finished, he checked his bracer, then fired off a spell.

And with only a few phone calls and a Fire materia, Mary Lin, sixteen-year-old budding ecoterrorist and the rare type who told the _truth _to make it stop, ceased to both exist and to have ever existed at all.

_"And tonight, raids were done on a known terrorist cell here in Midgar. The group is suspected to have been responsible for a series of bombings at ShinRa reactors across the planet, and four individuals have been taken into custody..."_

The video screen went off with a click, and the Turk put the remote control down, then turned to Tifa with a sigh as she crossed her arms. "And that's all that the public needs to see. All they want to see. We don't even have to say what happens to any of you afterwards, because no one _cares_. All they'll remember is 'the bad guys were arrested'. It makes things really easy for us. But maybe not so much for you," she ended with a faint smile.

Tifa just glared at her, breathing hard, and her tongue snaked out to catch some of the blood at the side of her mouth.

The Turk - a young woman probably only a hair older than Tifa herself, sighed and leaned against the table. The room was bare, other than that table, a chair, the chair Tifa was tied down to, and a single light. Tifa didn't want to think about the things on the table.

By now, she knew what most of them were used for anyway.

"You can make this a lot easier on all of us, you know. This will all stop if you just give us the information we need."

Tifa said nothing, just narrowed her eyes.

"You don't want to be here, I don't want to be here. You can end all of this right now. Why won't you just give us the information we need, so we can let you go?

"I don't get you terrorists. ShinRa has done so much for people all over the planet. So many people have much better, easier lives because of us."

"Except the people you've killed," Tifa said angrily.

The Turk smiled broadly. "_Killed_? ShinRa hasn't killed anyone. What funny ideas you have. What are you talking about? Who's been filling your head with that kind of nonsense?" she said, and the sickly sweetness of it made Tifa want to spit.

"'Filling my head'? No one has filled my head with anything; I've _seen_ what you bastards have done with my own eyes!" Tifa snapped, and something in that made the Turk narrow her eyes.

"You're not just some little tree-hugger like the rest of them, are you?" she said sharply, and Tifa clamped her mouth shut and tilted her jaw up defiantly.

That made the Turk narrow her eyes dangerously. Then she reached into her jacket and pulled a small gun out from the holster. Tifa felt herself going cold when the gun came out.

The Turk ignored her, and quickly and efficiently removed the bullets from the gun, something Tifa had definitely not been expecting. The Turk slipped the bullets into her left pocket, then reached into her right pocket, and pulled out new bullets. Tifa stared in confusion as the Turk, with the same smooth efficiency, loaded her gun with the other bullets.

Once the gun was loaded, the Turk leveled the gun at Tifa and fired so quickly it was almost as if she hadn't even had to take the time to aim.

Mind-numbing pain ripped through Tifa's shoulder as the bullet passed through, strong enough that she bit through her lip again, but then came the crazy thing - it was almost as if she was healing as quickly as the bullet was tearing through her. A moment later, the pain was only a throbbing memory of pain, and the wound had closed itself up.

"Isn't that a neat little bit of work?" the young Turk said with a smile, resting her hand with the gun against her shoulder. She looked at Tifa's shoulder, healed but still throbbing, with a kind of pride. "It's because of the casing on the bullets. It's got a special coating the lab rats cooked up just for us Turks," she said, her smile growing wider. "That coating's got Potion in it. I don't know how it works, even though I did help them out with the testing when they were cooking it up, but basically it means the bullet heals you up even as it's going through you. So very little bleeding, but still plenty of pain. " The Turk's smile changed; became something dangerous as she walked over. "It means we can keep this up for a nice, long time, and not have to worry about anything nasty, like you bleeding out all over the floor," she said, and poked Tifa's shoulder with the barrel of the gun as she spoke.

"And it also means," she said conversationally as she shifted her grip on her gun so she was holding it by the barrel, "that it puts just a bit of Potion in your system to heal you up quickly. And that makes it easier to do other things," she said, and then struck Tifa across the face with the butt of the gun.

Tifa would have gritted her teeth at the pain, but the dim suspicion that would make it _worse _kept her from it. And the Turk had been right; she could feel the worst of the jaw that had just broken knitting itself back together, just enough to make it a half-healed break instead of a fresh one.

The next shot she got, this one tidily between her ribs so it only ripped through her lung, was enough to heal her jaw up enough so she could talk. "Way to go, ShinRa technology," Tifa said, glaring at the Turk.

The Turk tutted, shaking her head slightly. "Hey, did you ever want kids?" she asked conversationally. "Too bad," she said, and shot Tifa low in the left side of her abdomen. The pain was blinding, and Tifa wondered if the bullet had gone completely through her. It felt like it had, and she felt a strange jolt of anger that, thanks to Shinra, she knew what it was like to have something from a weapon go completely through her - first a sword, now a bullet. "Well, you still might be able to have them one day. Only down fifty percent now," she said. "Want to make it zero?"sheasked, and shifted her gun just the slightest bit to the right.

Tifa felt another flare of rage, and all but spat out her next words. "It's not like you're going to let me out of here alive anyway."

The Turk laughed. "Oh, if only you were so lucky," she said, and fired again, this time aiming higher. "Tell me just what it is that you've _seen_," she said, narrowing her eyes. "And then give me names. As many names as you can, and _maybe_ you'll walk out of here alive one day."

The pain was bad, the bullet to her gut, but not nearly as bad as what she had felt when the SOLDIERs destroyed her home, or the few moments of lucidity on the trip to Midgar. Compared to that, she told herself, this was nothing.

She had been living on borrowed time anyway. She should have died that day, in Nibelheim. And as much as she'd wanted revenge, wanted to tear ShinRa down with her bare hands...Zangan had been right, and she had made the worst mistake she'd ever made when she'd left in a rage.

More blood dribbled down the side of her mouth, from when she had bitten into her lip at the pain, and she licked at it without thinking about it, the coppery sharpness of the taste hitting her fresh.

ShinRa had taken her home, her family, everything she had known, and now they wanted to take her future from her as well. But there was one thing they couldn't take from her - that they could never take from her.

Without a second thought but with the taste of blood in her mouth, Tifa raised her jaw and said the words that damned her.

"I'm from _Nibelheim_," she spat out angrily. "And I _remember_ what Sephiroth, what the SOLDIERs, what _ShinRa_ actually did there, for all you bastards tried to cover it up. I know what _all_ of you all are. So I will _never_ help you or give you _anyone_. _Never_. So just kill me now like you killed my everyone in my home, because I'll _die_ before I help you."

"I was afraid you'd say something like that," the Turk said with a sigh. She shook her head. "You martyr types are always the worst," she grumbled, and then hit Tifa with Sleep.

.-

The entire network was monitored.

Oh, not personally - Hojo had no time for such ridiculous things, he had important work to do. And because he was a busy man, he had long ago set up the network to alert him to certain things.

One thing he had it set to do was to flag him if information from two locations of interest were entered into the network - he'd inserted some code (quite subtle code - not that the idiots who were in charge of keeping the networks secure would have ever even noticed it had it been a clumsy hack instead of the lovely bit of code he had worked on in his spare time) to flag information and to alert him.

Nibelheim and Gongaga.

Two of his current samples had been raised in those areas. The one from Gongaga was oddly enough the most promising, though Hojo was unsure why. It had risen all the way to SOLDIER 1st even though it hadn't been exposed to JENOVA cells or DNA prior to being placed into the SOLDIER program. Hojo had several theories as to why, but without a larger sample size, it was impossible to test them. So he had Gongaga flagged in the system, and waited for when a chance for new samples would come his way.

Nibelheim, of course, was more obvious. He'd had several samples from Nibelheim at this point, and while all of them had been dismal failures to some extent - especially the pathetic specimen he'd acquired with the one from Gongaga (a pity, that one - he'd had high hopes for it, since it had managed to defeat S)- but all had given excellent data in _other_ ways, thanks to long-term mako exposure granting them all rather _interesting_ reactions to mako. The failed clone had not been the only one reduced to a blank by mako, and others had become _far_ more malleable than normal on a genetic level, making them prime for studying new techniques for genetic manipulation. The problem of course, was they were all simply wiped clean by the mako.

Aside from it rendering them useless, drooling husks, however, they all showed incredible reactions to everything else. Most of them, sadly, had had to be put down when his attempts to find ways to un-drooling husk them created instead slathering monsters, but _still_. There was something promising about samples from Nibelheim, and Hojo wanted a 'clean' sample from there to use for his newest idea for a way to recreate an Ancient while reducing the effects of the mako sensitivity (he was saving the one sample he had left from Nibelheim in hopes of being able to revive it once he unlocked the reasons for the sensitivity beyond the _obvious_ mental weakness). He had a wonderful new theory, but no way to _test_ it.

...until now. The system had sent him a notification, and as he read through the files that had been copied over - it _was_ a lovely bit of code - he felt a smile growing on his face.

A young female from Nibelheim, of an age within only two years of the last surviving Ancient ShinRa knew of, claiming to remember what ShinRa had done - meaning as a potential sample, it wouldn't be one of the useless samples from 'Nibelheim' that had cluttered up the place after ShinRa replaced the town - and had a scar with dimensions that exactly matched that of S's sword. So not only was it sure a pure 'Nibelheimerin,' as the women there were called, but one that had survived an actual meeting with Sephiroth and had been strong enough to escape both Sephiroth and the ShinRa 'cleaning crew,' and was strong-willed enough to act as a terrorist against ShinRa because of all of it.

The smile on his face widened, and he began to _laugh_.

.-

"Reno," Tseng said, and the way he said it - that creepily quiet way Tseng had of sounding completely calm in way that also sounded like he might be about thirty second from ripping out your spleen and wearing it for a hat or something - made Reno actually take his feet off his desk and sit up straight.

"Yeah?" Reno said.

Tseng paused. "Where is Rude?" he asked, frowning slightly.

"Takin' a piss," Reno said with a shrug. "Had, like, three cups of coffee this mornin'."

A slight look of disapproval at Reno's bluntness crossed Tseng's face, but Reno didn't pay it any mind - the boss got that look on his face a lot, and it wasn't like he'd never seen anyone pissing. They were fuckin' Turks; Reno'd bet his whole next paycheck Tseng had made more than one guy piss his pants.

"When he gets back, the two of you meet me in my office. We have an assignment," Tseng said.

Reno raised his eyebrows. It was one thing for Tseng to send him and Rude out - they usually only got hauled out for the bigger assignments - but for Tseng to be going _with_ them...

Reno sat up straight at his desk, leaning forward slightly. "So what it is?" he said. "Gotta big, for it to be all of us."

Tseng's face didn't change - much. But there was a faint creasing at his brow, right where that little dot was, and that right there was not a good sign.

"Nothing major. Just a little pick up," Tseng said. "My office, ten minutes," he said and walked out, and Reno sighed.

Oh, yeah. This was something _big_.

.-

Tifa looked up with she heard the sound of the door opening. She had no idea how much time had passed. It had all quickly turned into a series of meals and interrogations and then _silence_. She'd been put in some kind of solitary confinement and left there.

She supposed a week had passed since she'd spoken to any one, but it was only a guess, and based on the number of times the lights had been turned off for what she assumed was 'night,' but those had seemed all too short, and if she tried to sleep any other times, it was as if some sadist would blast the loudest noises they could.

She wondered if this was another way they were using to try and get her to break and tell them what they wanted.

Tifa let out a sharp hiss and went into fighting stance without thought when she saw who it was, adrenaline shooting through her and scraping through the bone weariness she felt.

The Turk laughed. "Not a smart idea, Lockheart. And don't worry. I'm not here to _talk_ to you, " she said, and her voice was too cheerful on the 'talk.' "No, you're getting a little transfer," she said, and Tifa didn't like her smile. "And you're _finally_ going to do some _good_ for society.

"Say good-night," the Turk said with a sharkish grin, and the Sleep that hit Tifa was fully mastered, and she was blessedly out before she hit the floor.

.-

They found her where Tseng knew they would, her church.

And as always, she led them on a chase, through the church and _up_.

But Tseng knew her - knew her better than she had any idea she did, and he was waiting for her at the top.

_I'm sorry Zack_, he thought, when she all but ran into him as she ran from Reno and Rude.

.-

When Tifa woke, she was definitely in a very different place than the cell she had been in.

It was still a cell, but it at least had a door that let her see out through bars, unlike the thick, metal door with only a slot they had occasionally slipped food in through. It was also much larger, big enough for two people.

She felt disoriented still, from the Sleep, and she rubbed her face.

The Sleep had helped, as loathe as she was to admit it, but it wasn't enough. She thought about getting up off of the hard bed, but...but the cell would still be there when she woke up, she thought, smiling faintly with a bitter edge.

"I will get out of this," she whispered, and closed her eyes. "I _am_ stronger than this, and I will get out of this," she said again, because she wouldn't let Zangan have been _right_.

.-

"Oy, wakey-wakey, Sleeping Princess!" a voice yelled mockingly, enough to wake Tifa - especially when the door opened.

By now, she knew the door opening to her cell was never good, and it woke her quickly, and she was on her feet quickly.

She wasn't quite expecting for a young women about her age to be shoved into the open door. "You girls play nice," the red-haired Turk said with a grin, and shut the door. Two other Turks where there, but they said nothing. Tifa glared at them, far more wary of people in black suits than of a girl in a pastel dress.

They didn't react, just looked at them both for a bit, then the one who looked like he could have been from her area of the world, or from Wutai, gave a slight gesture and they all walked away.

When they were gone, Tifa turned her attention to the girl. "So who are you?" Tifa asked, slightly warily. "Which _circle_?"

"Aerith Gainsborough, and _circle_? What, like my mother's knitting circle?" the woman said with a laugh, and Tifa knew then that whoever this 'Aerith' was, she _wasn't_ in Avalanche - which answered one question while raising others. "I would say 'pleased to meet you,' but given the circumstances, I can't really say I'm that pleased," she said with a faint, self-deprecating smile and a shrug. She waited a beat before she prompted, "And you are...?"

Tifa blinked, slightly surprised. "Oh. Yes. Tifa. Tifa Lockheart," she said quickly, which a perfunctory bow more out of habit than politeness; a habit she hadn't been able to shake the whole time she lived in Midgar, no matter how much it had made the Midgarites snicker at how country she was.

Tifa hadn't really cared - she didn't _want_ to be a Midgarite in the first place.

"Oh Yes Tifa Tifa Lockheart. I'll be sure to remember that."

"Why are you here?" Tifa asked bluntly, and the woman, Aerith, went a little wide-eyed at her tone. Tifa didn't care. She didn't care about a lot of things, and how she came across to someone who very well might be another Turk trying to get information out of her was one of them.

"I expect because they want to study me," Aerith said softly, suddenly serious. "And you?"

"Why would they want to study you?" Tifa said in confusion - of all the things she had figured the girl would say, that _wasn't_ one of them. "Isn't this another jail cell?"

"Oh, dear," Aerith said, biting her lip. "You really _don't_ know where we are now, do you?"

Tifa's eyes narrowed. "Start making sense. _Now_."

Aerith looked slightly taken aback, but then she spoke, and her voice was oddly gentle. "We're in the ShinRa building in Midgar. In the upper section. The science section."

"The _science_ section?" Tifa said, boggling. "But...what? Why?" she said, completely confused. That didn't make any sense at all. Why would they have moved _her_ into the science section? And why under the Heavens would a science section have _cells_?

"Because they're going to experiment on us," Aerith said flatly, and Tifa stared at her dumbfounded for a moment before she shook her head.

"That...that is..._ridiculous_," she said. "This...this is some other kind of _trick_. Like them not letting me sleep. You're another Turk, aren't you?" she snapped, and ran to the doors. She grabbed the bars and shook the door so hard it rattled, but it stayed. "You...you bastards can just give up now! I won't give you any names!"

She yelled until she realized how much of a waste of time it had been, and she turned back to 'Aerith.'

"I'm not a Turk," Aerith said softly, and Tifa let out a disgusted noise and flopped back on her bed.

"You don't believe me?" she said suddenly.

"After everything they did to me before putting me in here," Tifa said stiffly, "_No_. I don't trust you at _all_."

Aerith frowned. "Everything they...?" she began, and Tifa shut her up by sitting up and lifting her shirt.

Aerith let out a sharp gasp, and Tifa let the shirt drop. Oh, she'd healed up cleanly, with the Cures they'd been so nice as to use on her...but wounds still _scarred, _no matter how fast you did a Cure on them, if they were major enough. Her entire abdomen was covered now in fine, circular bullet wounds so new they were still shiny.

The girl let out a sudden, surprised gasp. "Your hand, what's...oh," she ended with another gasp, staring at her own hand. Tifa looked to see what she was staring at, and saw there was a a neat black tattoo of even letters on the back of Aerith's hand, Cured but still raised slightly red.

She looked down at her own, and her eyes went wide.

They stared wide-eyed at their hands, before they looked wide-eyed at each other.

XVIII

XVIII-A

Aerith swallowed before she spoke, her face bloodless. "I think we're in trouble," Aerith said, and her voice wavered.

Tifa nodded. "I think you're right," she said, and there was a quaver in her voice as well.

.-

_The problem with the subjects from the town of N is that long-term exposure to mako has, contrary to expectations, made them more susceptible to the more negative symptoms, such as loss of awareness of self. However, this susceptibility to mako has also meant they respond extremely well to other properties of it as well._

_My current theory is that the apparent mako-induced loss of self may not be simple weakness (although a weaker mind will, of course, have more pronounced effects) but may be a way of countering the way that mako can induce mental instability. The area around N has tales of 'Ohnegesichterin,' or "the faceless maidens," which all involve girls getting lost in Mt. Nibel and becoming a kind of hungry demon, which makes me think that this is a stand-in for those who have lost all sense of self from the naturally-occurring mako fountains there. Since the demons in the story are always looking for a new face so they can become human again, and similar stories (the _のっぺら尼_, 'nopperani') are found in an area of Wutai thought to have a similar mako pool, I wondered if this might mean that the 'faceless' one is trying to find someone to imprint on (ignoring, of course, how the person whose face they steal dies in the Nibelheim versions; since this is a tale to frighten children from the woods, there is no reason, if my theory holds, that the so-called Ohnegesichterin would need a death to occur for imprinting to take hold)._

_To test this, I will try to induce 'imprinting' by the new sample from N on the Ancient sample that has recently been acquired. With luck, this will result not in a sample that has lost all sense of self, but one that will replace their 'self' with that of an Ancient. To achieve this, once genetic splicing has begun, both samples will be placed in the same mako tank (for controlled amounts of time; given the now-verified susceptibility of subject from N to mako poisoning when suspended long-term in the tanks and the resulting failures, attempts will be made to minimize the severity and speed on onset). Subject XVIII will be exposed to compound 164 in order to induce susceptibility by way of natural compounds that induce Confuse while at the same time sedating so the sample will not damage itself or the Ancient sample. While in a heightened state of susceptibility, proximity to another may either speed the imprinting process, or retard the loss of self, either of which will be wholly satisfactory results, one of which may be a way to 'salvage' the other failed N sample._

Hojo's notes on subject XVIII, p. 2

.-

Aerith had tried to talk to her, but Tifa just stared at her hand, and Aerith had finally given up, almost gratefully. She didn't think she could really manage anything right then, even though part of her desperately craved distraction.

Something also told her - that same quiet, still voice she could often hear when she really _listened_ - that trying to draw anything out of Tifa right then. She wanted nothing more, right then, to go over and wrap her arms around this strange girl who seemed so angry and so fragile and so close to breaking after going through only the gods themselves knew, but she didn't; she wrapped her arms around herself instead and tried not to let herself think too deeply about what this all meant.

She had only the vaguest of memories of the ShinRa labs, almost as few as of the mother and father who had died trying to escape. She suspected it was a good thing, that she remembered so little of the place and more of her mother's words to her. But she remembered how fervent her mother had been to escape, and she remembered a tiny fragment of hushed conversation between her parents, of "professor" and "start on Aerith," and panicked whispered of things a tiny child had no way of understanding or being able to remembered because of it. But those fragments were enough; she knew her parents had risked their lives - had _given_ their lives - to get Aerith out before whatever the scientists had been doing to her mother could be done to her.

She wouldn't lie, not even to herself - she was terrified. Terrified of what it meant, terrified of what they might do to her.

It wasn't just for Tifa's sake that Aerith wanted to hug her; wanted to hold tight to _someone_ and not be _alone _with the weight of it.

She wondered how long before it started, and in an almost perverse kind of cosmic timing, she heard footsteps coming down the hall.

They both, she and Tifa, looked up at the door when two men in the white lab coats and two helmeted troopers stopped in front of them.

The older one in glasses smiled, and Aerith felt something in her twist at it, and she had in impression of things twisted and rotten at the sight of him. She couldn't explain it; but she felt the still and small voice, though silent, _recoil_ at him.

"Excellent," he said, nodding, and then turned to the other man. "XVIII is to be given 164 after the sedative course I spoke of before. Then insertions for both, for one hour to begin with," he said. "Be careful of XVIII, because I have been warned it is quite feisty," he said, and the 'it' put Aerith on edge. "I will not see my precious samples damaged unless absolutely necessary, especially since it could add unforeseen variables," he said sternly, and Aerith knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had no care at all for their well-being.

"Yes, professor," the other man said, and Aerith went stiff.

"See to it, then. I will double check the tank solutions. Deliver the samples in ten minutes," he said, and the other scientist nodded once, and the professor walked on ahead.

The scientist who remained looked at them both curiously, and his gaze lingered for a bit too long on Tifa, who was ignoring him.

He cleared his throat. "Now, I don't want any trouble," he said, then swallowed at whatever look it was Tifa gave him.

_Good_, Aerith thought to herself. _She's still got fight left in her. We're going to need it._

"OK, then," he said, then raised his arm and fired off a Materia.

Tifa barely had time to react before the magic hit her, and then it was almost instantly obvious what he'd hit her with, by the way her eyes went unfocused and she started looking around in a panic.

"A _Confuse_?" Aerith yelled, barely believing her eyes. "How is that a _sedative_?" she said, feeling panicked, and hoping she be able to stay out of the way if Tifa felt she was under attack and started to attack _her_.

"Um," the scientist said, then gestured at the troopers. "You two. Secure them," he said, gesturing now at Tifa and Aerith, then opening the cell door. "_Carefully_."

Tifa certainly did have fight left in her, but it was unfocused now, and one of the troopers, after she knocked the other one into one of the beds so hard it shattered, wrestled her down when she leapt at Aerith in her blindness from the Confuse, and strapped her down to the remaining bed, which was when Aerith noticed for the first time that the beds had _restraining straps_.

The scientist rushed in once Tifa was restrained, and only the other trooper, who had gotten up and now had his rifle out, stopped Aerith from rushing over and trying to stop him once he got over to Tifa and pulled out a needle.

"You, keep her steady," he said to the trooper who had wrestled Tifa down, who nodded once, and he held Tifa steady as the scientist slid the needle into her arm.

It was almost terrifying how quickly Tifa went still, and now Aerith rushed over, the trooper with his rifle on her be damned.

Tifa's eyes were still unfocused, and her breathing was quick, a sure sign of a Confuse, but she was no longer in a panic. Aerith didn't know _what_ this was.

"Bring them down to the insertion room," the scientist said, wiping his brow with his lab coat sleeve, and the trooper with the rifle harnessed it on his back, and grabbed Aerith's arm roughly.

"This way, miss," he said, and his voice was far kinder than the grip on her arm.

Aerith's lip trembled, but she refused to cry. _Refused_.

She looked back as he escorted her out, and them undoing the straps and hauling Tifa up.

_Mama_, she thought, a Blizzard in her stomach, _I think I understand now_.

.-

"_Ich will nicht!_" Tifa yells angrily in _Narslandische_. "_Ich will _nicht_ vergessen! Ich _werde_ nicht vergessen_!"

_The open-handed slap Zangan gives her across her mouth is the first and only time he has ever _struck_ her. Yes, she has been hit by him many times when she is training, but this is different; this is something devastating in a way that none of the bruises she's ever gotten from being taught to fight have ever been, and the taste of blood in her mouth now is unlike all of the other times she has tasted it._

_"You speak using words that have vanished from this world," he says sharply. "Never speak them again, unless _you_ wish to vanish as well."_

_Zangan walks away from her angrily, and that day is the last that she ever speaks in dialect again._

.-

The smell of mako was still sharp in her nose when the troopers brought them back to their cell. The world was a little sharper, a little brighter, and she couldn't help but remember Zack's bright eyes, the most amazing she'd ever seen..and what they were proof of.

He'd been missing for so long now. She didn't want to think he was gone, but...

_There are no 'buts,_' she told herself firmly. _If he were dead...I would know._

She pushed her doubts away, and looked over at Tifa, and felt another Blizzard being cast in her belly.

Tifa...Tifa wasn't all right.

She still had that strange Confused-but-not look to her, and was just standing where she had been left by the trooper, staring out at nothing.

"Tifa," Aerith said, and her voice wavered at first. She firmed it quickly, because she suspected now would be a _terrible_ time to give Tifa even the tiniest inkling of the fear Aerith was beginning to feel. "Tifa?" she asked, going over to the other woman and taking her hand to get her attention.

Tifa blinked once, and Aerith was grateful for that much of a response. "Tifa, are you...?" she begin, and Tifa blinked again, slowly, seeing nothing, and then, more disconcerting to Aerith than anything else, she let out a strange sound, one that is almost a word, then stops, and a single tear welled up in her eyes and splashed out.

Just one. And then nothing.

Aerith gave up, gave into the urge she'd had before and wrapped her arms tight around Tifa.

Tifa didn't respond, not at first, but then some of the terrifying tension seemed to drain out of her.

Aerith dragged Tifa down to the floor with her, and sat, cradling Tifa against her. "Ssh, ssh," Aerith said, stroking Tifa's hair with trembling hands. Tifa rested her head against Aerith's chest, her eyes wide and unseeing, and Aerith knew that somehow, someway, she had to get them out of there.

.-

End Part 1

.-

_"They can forget," Ayumi said. "But I can't."_

_"Of course not," Aomame said._

_"It's like the genocides throughout history."_

_"Genocide?"_

_"The ones who do it, they can think up reasons to rationalize it, and they can forget. They can turn away from the things they don't want to see. But the ones it happened to, they can't forget. They can't turn away. That memory is passed down from parent to child. And what we call 'the world,' Aomame, is a battle that will never end between one set of memories and the memories on the other side."_

_-Haruki Murakami, 1Q84_ Book 1


	3. That Desolate, Arid Place

**Summary/Prompt:** Instead of waiting to breed new Ancients, Hojo decides to simply create a new one from Aerith and a terrorist who remembers more than she should.

**A/N:** This is for illumynare, who won my help_japan auction. :D She made an incredibly generous bid, and as someone actually living in Japan, I am extremely grateful. Also, I'd ask that if you enjoyed this fic, to please consider donating to $5 or so to a charity. It doesn't really matter which one, but it'd be a way for the spirit of help_japan (and all of the help_* auctions) to keep going.

For the sake of brevity, I'm cutting out the extensive author's notes I actually wrote for this.-if you are interested, I'll be posting them separately, as an Ultimania. :D

Also, ahahaha, I didn't figure it would take so long to get another part out; I have been having a hell of a year - between work, studying, and injuries (including one that left me unable to type without pain for several months) & doctor trips (woo-hoo, rare collagen disorders~ asdfghjkl;:), I haven't had much time to work on it. Sowwy! ^^;;

.-

Part II:

荒れ果てた潤いのない場所

[That Desolate, Arid Place]

.-

私という存在の核心にあるのは無ではない。荒れ果てた潤いのない場所でもない。

-村上春樹、1Q84 Book 2

.-

They sat like that for so long Aerith's legs went numb.

She didn't even notice.

She would have given anything, as she waited and held on to Tifa, to have had a Cure or have been so exhausted that a limit break came out. She felt it, then, deeply in her bones, that she truly was only half a Cetra; that she lacked an ability she feels her mother must have, to have been able to fix whatever tendril of wrong that was beginning to snake its way into Tifa.

But it was something she couldn't do, for all she could feel it. All she could do was hold on to the other woman and wait for her to come back from whatever place it was she had gone. And to pray, more than she ever had in her life, that they would somehow find a way out.

It seemed like forever before Tifa finally moved or made a sound, but she finally let out a faint "nngh," and shifted slightly.

"Tifa?" Aerith said slowly, feeling both relieved and filled with dread at the same time.

"Nn," Tifa let out softly, then exhaled heavily.

"Take your time," Aerith said, her voice gentle, rubbing Tifa's back. _Everything is going to be fine_, Aerith told herself. _Tifa is fine. Nothing...nothing bad could have happened this fast anyway._

_I hope._

"No...no, I think I'm OK," Tifa said after a moment, sounding tired and groggy, and as if she was waking up from a deep sleep. She let out a long sigh, and didn't lift her head. "What...what happened?"

That didn't sound like a good sign, but Aerith knew no good would come of panicking. _Plus_, she thought, _they hit her with a Confuse before whatever under the Heavens they did to us_.

Best, she decided, to go with the mildest truth of what she _did_ know.

"Do you remember what happened before the Confuse?"

Tifa frowned slightly, then pulled herself up, away from Aerith and sat across from her. "I remember...there was...yeah," she said again, brushing her hair out of her face. "There were two men, right? And troopers."

Aerith nodded.

"OK. Yeah. I remember everything before that..jerk hit me with whatever it was. A Confuse. Bastard," she muttered under her breath, and something about the way she said it made Aerith think Tifa didn't curse very often.

_ShinRa will do that to a person_, she thought.

"After that, it's all a giant muddle," Tifa said, shaking her head. "Odin's breath, it still feels like a muddle," she said,sighing and rubbing her temple. "Like...like I just can't completely shake the Confuse. Just kind of _off_," she finished, trailing off and her shoulders hunching in as she wrapped her arms around herself. "What under the Heavens are they going to do to us? What _did_ they do?"

Aerith looked at her hands. She folded them on her lap when Tifa'd sat up, and without thinking, she'd put her left hand on top of her right, and the clean, black lines of the XVIII-A tattoo screamed out at her.

She covered it with her other hand, and it seemed _wrong_, somehow, how the tattooed skin felt the same under her fingers as the rest of her.

"You probably don't want to know," she said softly, and Tifa flinched almost as if Aerith's words had slapped her. Then Tifa narrowed her eyes and lifted her jaw.

"Doesn't matter if I want to know or not," she said, and there was a flash of strength in them. Then she blinked and made a face. "Ugh. I smell like someone shoved me in the mako fountains in Mt. Nibel!" she said, wrinkling her nose.

Aerith blinked. "I don't know Mt. Nibel, but you're not too far off about being shoved in a mako fountain," she said, and Tifa stared at her. "They put us in a tank of mako. Then...I don't know, something knocked me out after put us in."

"What under the Heavens...!" Tifa said, sounding dumbfounded. "_Why_? Don't they know how dangerous.-!"

"They do," Aerith said softly. "They know _exactly_ what mako can do."

Tifa's eyes went wide. "I," she said slowly, "have got to get out of here. I'm not gonna be ShinRa's lab rat!"

Aerith frowned. "Hey, what about me?"

Tifa's eyes narrowed suddenly. "I still don't know if I can trust you," she said, a sudden edge to her voice. "I don't remember them hitting you with a Confuse," she said, and there was something so sharp and cold in her voice Aerith flinched at it. "And how do you know that ShinRa knows what mako can do?" Tifa said suspiciously.

It stung, more than a little, but Aerith couldn't really blame Tifa for her wariness - she'd seen those scars. But _still_...

They were going to be stuck in here, with ShinRa doing only the gods knew what to them while they were, and the only chance they had of getting out was to work together. Aerith held up her left hand. "You saw this, right?" she said, and pointed to the tattoo, and Tifa flinched this time. "I'm in this, same as you. I don't know where they got you from or why, but they just...they just snatched me up, right out of the old church I always used as a safe place. I thought I'd gotten away, but...They had just been playing with me, all these years and letting me think I could get away if they really wanted me," she said, hating each word and her own stupidity over the years.

She'd always laughed it off when ShinRa was watching, telling her mother it'd be OK and they hadn't once caught her yet because she was always careful. "My mother must be so worried," she said, more to herself than to Tifa, and her voice cracked. She hadn't even thought about her mother until just then, but now that she had...Aerith didn't even know how long it had been, she she guessed it had been close to a day, at least, probably more, and the idea of her mother waiting and waiting for her to come home...

She wondered if Tseng would at least have the decency to tell her mother something. She thought he would, but...

She sniffled suddenly, and blinked quickly, but she could feel the tears welling up in her eyes. _Stupid, stupid, stupid, all these years, I was so_ stupid.

"I've got to get some sleep," Tifa muttered. "Look. We'll...we'll talk after I've gotten some sleep. They kept me pretty sleep deprived until they dumped me in here, and I can't think," she said, her voice small, and Tifa suddenly seemed different, almost like another person, and Aerith wondered if that was a glimpse of who Tifa _had_ been, before whatever made her into someone so angry and mistrusting had happened.

...She'd seen those scars. And those came _after_ whatever had made her into a terrorist.

"Go ahead," Aerith said with a sigh. "They were nice enough to fix the bed that got broken while we were in the mako tanks," she said, and the giggle that came out to that sounded mad even to her own ears.

Tifa gave her a long look, the moment of vulnerability gone, replaced with wariness again, then shook her head. "Which one's mine?" she said.

"I really don't think they bothered to assign them," Aerith said, with another insane grin fighting to come to her lips. If she didn't watch it, she was going to start laughing, and then she'd be sobbing uncontrollably, and she didn't want that. She could feel her nerves fraying, and she tamped down to control them before they shattered out of her control.

"Then I'm taking the one on the left," Tifa said slowly, still wary, and laid down without another word, facing the wall and her back to both the cell and Aerith.

The mad urge to laugh until she sobbed came back, and never had Aerith felt so alone, or wanted so much to go _home_.

.-

Tifa opened her eyes slowly, feeling not quite awake, but finally not bone-crushingly exhausted. It had been what felt like far too long since she'd felt anything like rested, and this seemed like the closest she had been in as long as she could remember. She closed her eyes again and sighed before rolling onto her back and stretching.

Reality, though, crashed in on her as soon as she opened her eyes again and _saw_ the unfamiliar ceiling that was so much like the ones in the cells she had been in, but different.

"No," she said, and sat up.

"'Fraid so, and good morning," Aerith said from the other side of the room. Aerith was sitting on her bed, not doing anything. "Or something like that. It might be closer to afternoon."

"How long was I asleep?" Tifa asked. The inside of her mouth felt like something had died in it, and she wanted a glass of water, a bathroom, a shower, and a toothbrush in whatever order she could get them.

"About a day," Aerith said, and Tifa's eyes went wide. "I thought you probably needed the sleep," she said with a faint shrug. "Plus, they didn't come for us, so I figured it was better to let you get some rest while you could. We're going to need our strength."

"This isn't a bad dream, is it," Tifa said flatly.

"I wish it were," Aerith said softly, and something about the way the other woman looked down at her hands made Tifa begin to suspect she wasn't just some ShinRa agent in her to trick her into giving up names of other members of AVALANCHE, that maybe Aerith was in this just as much as she was.

_Or maybe she's a good actress_, Tifa thought. _They didn't shoot her up with Confuse or inject her with weird whatevers. I can't trust her. I can't trust _anyone _here_.

"Bathroom?" Tifa finally said, and the corner of Aerith's lip turned up in something almost like a bitter smile. Then she gestured towards the corner of the cell furthest away from the door.

"Oh, no way," Tifa said wide-eyed, shaking her head. There was a small metal toilet in the corner, and a small sink with two plastic cups, two toothbrushes, toothpaste, a small bar of soap, and a roll of toilet paper on it next to the toilet.

"I'll just look at the wall until you're done," Aerith said, pinking slightly, and Tifa felt her whole face flame red as Ifrit's flame.

There was no going around it, though, and Tifa tried not to think about it too hard as she went over to the metal toilet.

Tifa was no stranger to embarrassment, but this, having not even the _semblance_ of privacy for something like this, made her wish a hole would open up in the floor and just swallow her whole.

She hated ShinRa.

When she was done, the flush sounded loud to her ears - but not as loud as the splashes from using the toilet had felt - and she washed her hands, feeling hollow. That hollow feeling remained as she brushed her teeth, then filled the cup and drank down the oddly metallic-tasting water that came out of the tap.

She dried her hands on her skirt before looking around the cell, looking at anything rather than look at Aerith just yet.

It was bigger than the cells she'd been in up until then. She'd been in solitary confinement cells until then, and those had barely had room enough for a bed and the damnable toilet in the corner. This cell, though, had clearly been designed to hold two people, even if there wasn't all that much room. The corner with the toilet and the sink, two beds, and nothing else. There was room enough to move around, but not by much, and nothing there for them to do.

Tifa paced for a bit in the small area, glad enough for at least that, before she stopped and wrapped her arms around herself.

"So...um...so, tell me about yourself," Tifa said, needing something get rid of the awkwardness and humiliation she was feeling just then. She didn't know anything about this girl she'd been tossed in with, and only the gods knew how long this would last.

She could hear how forced it was and felt even more pathetic for it, but she figured better this awkwardness than just silence.

"Well, what do you want to know?" Aerith asked, turning now to face Tifa. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, her skirt loose enough to allow it. "I mean, I'm just a flower seller."

"Yeah, and I'm just a bartender," Tifa said flatly, narrowing her eyes. Something didn't make sense at all - 'just a flower seller' nothing. If Aerith was there, it was because either ShinRa wanted her to disappear, or she was working for them.

She'd thought Zangan a coward for constantly running from ShinRa; now she realized he had known something she didn't, something she was learning more of every day they had her. She already knew how treacherous they were; had seen them rebuild and repopulate Nibelheim all in under a few months to cover what Sephiroth had done.

She'd gotten the wrong lesson when Zangan had rubbed her face in what they did, she knew that now. Zangan had been trying to _warn_ her, and she'd...

...She couldn't trust this girl.

"You said something about this not being a jail. That they were going to experiment on us. What did you mean?"

Aerith stared at her and blinked a few times. "I meant exactly that. They're going to experiment on us. I think they already started."

"And you know all that _how_?"

Aerith lifted her jaw. "Because I was born in one of their labs. They experimented on my mother. She escaped with me and my father, one of the scientists, when I was five. That's how I know."

Tifa sucked in a breath, taken aback. That was not an answer she'd been expecting. Then shook her head. No. She couldn't trust as neat and tidy a story as that. Not yet. "They didn't come after you?"

"Of course they did," Aerith snapped. "Both my parents were killed when we escaped. My biological mother left me with the woman who raised me. And the Turks came by often enough to let us know they knew where I was." She shrugged. "I guess they decided I wasn't important enough to recapture since my mother was dead. Until now."

"That...doesn't make much sense."

"Well, I wasn't the one they were experimenting on at the time. For all they knew, I was useless to them. They were watching me the whole time to see if I would be, I guess, and it looked like they finally decided I was," Aerith said, and the words sounded bitter.

Tifa looked down at her hands, torn between wanting to believe Aerith and wariness. It could go either way. It really was a matter of how important she was - she'd been important enough for them to capture alive and torture days on end for information, but was she worth this much of a facade?

...but ShinRa was so, SO very good at facades. She wouldn't have thought Nibelheim worth the effort they'd gone through, either. Zangan's home, they'd wiped off the map so completely it was as if it had never existed, but hers...

"Here," Aerith said, taking something out of her pocket and holding it out. "It's not much, but it's all I could keep. They took your tray of food away when they took mine, even though you'd been sleeping and hadn't eaten."

At the sight of the small roll, Tifa's stomach suddenly burst into life. She suddenly felt so hungry she could have eaten her own arm off, and she felt a wave of gratitude wash over her before she squashed it as hard as she could.

"Thank you," she said, bowing slightly without realizing it in a motion engrained in her since childhood as she reached for the roll.

"They should be back something in an hour or two. Try to hold on until then," Aerith said gently.

"I've gone without before," Tifa said shrugging. "And this'll take the edge off."

"Things must have been hard for you," Aerith said gently, and Tifa shrugged again as she took a bite. The bread was pretty terrible, dry and hard and nothing like the thick, heavy breads from home, but right then, she didn't care. It was bread, and that at least was something.

"You don't become a terrorist for no reason," Tifa said after she swallowed, and a faint, sad smile touched Aerith's lips.

"No," she said, "I suppose you don't."

They fell silent, and Tifa ate her bread.

.-

"Both of you, up!" a voice yelled sharply, and Aerith's head jerked up.

Her heart sank. She had been more bored than she'd ever been in her life, but this wasn't something she wanted to happen.

Tifa all but leapt up from the floor, where she had been doing exercises. Aerith had watched her for awhile, feeling lazy and a bit pudgy at first, then in mild disbelief as Tifa just kept on doing sit-ups past the hundred mark. Her stomach started to hurt just watching Tifa, and watching someone exercise did get dull after a bit, so she'd started running her fingers through her hair, trying to detangle it as best she could. A hairbrush wasn't among the amenities ShinRa had graced them with, so all she had were her fingers.

So she was detangling as Tifa was counting push-ups, when the troopers and the scientist came.

Tifa had very obviously been trained in some kind of martial art, of that much Aerith was now certain. Tifa quickly went into a fighting stance with a smooth, practiced grace, and was rewarded by one of the troopers leveling his gun right at her.

"You don't want to do that," he said.

"You don't know anything about what I want to do," Tifa said defiantly, and was rewarded quickly when the trooper, faint trails of a Haste around him, slammed the butt of his gun into her belly a shade too fast for her to block.

"I do know you don't want to piss me off," he said as Tifa gasped. "Trust me on that. Now, are we going to do this the easy way, or the you-regret it way?"

Tifa looked like she wanted to say something, but Aerith jumped in. "Tifa...no. _Please_."

Tifa gave her a hard look, but put her hands in the air.

"Smart girl," the trooper said.

"Drop dead," Tifa said sharply, and this time the butt of the Hasted trooper's gun hit her hard in the jaw. Tifa let out a sharp, pained cry and clamped her hands over where she'd been hit.

"Don't break the sample!" the scientist said sharply, sounding alarmed. "If it's injured...I'm not authorized to use any materia besides this on it!" he said.

Aerith had run over to Tifa while this was happening, ignoring the other trooper with this gun trained on her. Blood was seeping from between Tifa's fingers.

"Let me see," she said softly. Tifa's hands were shaking, but Aerith was able to pull them away from her jaw.

Tifa's broken jaw.

"You cruel bastard!" Aerith said sharply, and the trooper turned his gun on her.

"Now, you already saw what happens when someone gives me lip. Do you need a lesson as well?" he said warningly, and Aerith clinched her jaw so tightly her teeth ground together, clamping down on the angry words that wanted to come screaming out.

"We are on a schedule!" the scientist said in irritation.

"Aren't you going to help her?" Aerith said disbelievingly, not able to hold it in.

He ignored her.

"Both of you, hands where we can see them," the other trooper said.

Tifa's blood was dripping down onto the floor, guns were trained on them both, and Aerith raised her hands.

.-

"What," Hojo snapped angrily, "have you done to my sample?"

Bennett swallowed thickly. "She was resisting, and..."

Hojo leveled a stare on him, then pointedly looked at the troopers, their guns, then back to Bennett.

"I do not," Hojo said, his voice sounding just as angry as before, "want to introduce uncontrolled variables into my experiments!" he snapped, then pushed up his glasses, and Bennett felt his stomach dropped. "We have no idea how pain is going to influence the intake of the compound. That is not a test I intended to begin at this early stage! Baselines must be established first!"

"Do...do you want me to Cure her, sir?" Bennett said weakly.

Hojo's eyes narrowed, and Bennett knew he'd said the wrong thing. "What did I just say about uncontrolled variables? And are you a complete idiot? A Cure or potion would most likely completely clean all of compound 164 out of her system."

"Wait, wouldn't that take an elixir or an Esu.-" Bennett began, and his words dried up quickly at the look on Hojo's face.

"Are you lecturing me on compounds I myself have developed?" he said, his voice no longer angry but almost terrifyingly conversational.

"No, sir," Bennett stammered nervously. "I was mistaken. You're right," he said.

"Put them into the tanks. As they are. And if those idiotic muscleheads excessively damage my samples again, without my permission and in uncontrolled situations, well," he said, and Bennett could figure out the end to that. "Oh, and Dr. Bennett," Hojo said, in that same conversational tone, "If I were you, I would hope that today's numbers come out surprisingly well. The other direction would be...unfortunate," he ended with, the light glinting off his glasses, and Bennett swallowed again, his throat as dry as his hands were damp.

.-

_"Where were you born?" she asks as they hike. Tifa still tires easily and feels occasional twinges of pain from the time Zangan will not allow her to talk about, and she needs a distraction from the pain that is oddly intense that day. And it has become a challenge for her now, to drag from Zangan where he is from, to make him admit that he is from a place that had been.-because if he does, then it means she can remember Nibelheim, that Tifa has the right to remember._

_"The place where my mother was."_

_"And where was that?"_

_"The place where she bore me," he answers with a smile, and will say no more. _

.-

Aerith slowly opened her eyes. She blinked for a few minutes before getting her bearings and sitting up. The world was sharp, somehow, and clear, and she wondered if it was the mako. She had no idea how long they'd stuffed her and Tifa in the tanks, but it seemed it was long enough for it to make things seem almost too in-focus.

Was this how Zack had seen.-how Zack _saw_.-the world?

She shook her head to clear it, then looked over at Tifa's bed. Tifa was lying on it, eyes open but not focused on anything, and Aerith felt her stomach drop. "Tifa?"

No answer.

She got up, feeling unsteady, then went over to Tifa's side, and flinched.

Tifa's jaw was still broken. The blood was gone, but...

"Dear gods, how could they just leave you like this?" Aerith said, shocked. "I'm sorry," she whispered, and gently prodded Tifa's jaw, to try and do something; to set it if nothing else.

Tifa didn't move at all, just lay there with her eyes staring at nothing, and Aerith fell to her knees by the bed and bowed her head, clasping one of Tifa's hands in hers.

This was not her place; not the church where she could always hear the Planet and focus that still, small voice into life, but she had to try.

_Don't do it_, a voice warned her. _They'll know for sure what you are and what you can do if you do._

Aerith hesitated, then felt a wave of shame for it. _They already know_, she thought. _And I am what I am. I won't let them take that away from me._

She took a deep breath, and felt the tendrils of a whisper around her, and focused on it. She wasn't sure why she could hear it now, but she wasn't going to question it. That wisp was what she needed, and she felt her hair flutter with the whirling tendrils of power as she pushed herself into a Limit Break.

It was just barely enough in this place and her at only the bare basest level that could trigger a Limit, but it was _enough_, and that was what mattered. She couldn't fix the _wrongness_ she could just barely sense in Tifa, but she could fix _this_.

This was not her place. But she was what she was.

She laid her head on the mattress of Tifa's bed and closed her eyes.

.-

Tifa felt like her head had been pulled open, her brains stirred around with a stick, and then her head shut back closed again.

"Ugh," she let out, and slowly sat up, then rubbed her temples, trying to get her brains back in order.

Something stirred by her, and she looked over and down quickly. Aerith was sitting on the floor by her bed, asleep with one arm on the bed and using it as a pillow.

Tifa's shifting seemed to wake her up, and Aerith looked up at her sleepily. "Are you OK?" she said, rubbing her eyes. "How's your jaw?"

Tifa frowned for a moment in confusion, then her eyes went wide as she remembered. She raised her hand to her jaw and cheek gingerly. "It's...it's fine. It's not broken anymore. It doesn't even hurt," she said.

Aerith let out a sigh of relief.

"Good of them to at least fix that," Tifa said, but the words sounded bitter even to her.

"Yeah," Aerith said, looking at her hands. "It was the least they could do."

"I'd be amazed they did that much," Tifa said, and this time the anger she felt came out, "but they always were good about cleaning up their messes so there was no proof." She touched her stomach, where the scar from Sephiroth's sword would always be. They may have been able to erase everything else he'd done, but they'd never be able to erase that from her very skin.

That, or any of the other scars they had left her with. "Bastards," she hissed under her breath.

"Tifa..." Aerith began, and she looked concerned. "Are you...what did they...why are you so angry? It's not just this, is it? Or anything they did before...before they put you in here," she said, almost as if she was shying away from saying it.

"Before they tortured me?" she said flatly, and Aerith flinched, but nodded.

"Like that's not enough?" Tifa said, barely even able to believe this. She had every right to be angry; who was this girl to act otherwise?

"Something made you into a terrorist," Aerith said softly. Her voice was hesitant, but there was something strong and certain in her eyes. "You're not even my age, I don't think. So what happened? No one just decides out of the blue to try and blow up reactors."

"I joined AVALANCHE," Tifa said, not caring if Aerith was a spy or not, "because I hate ShinRa and everyone connected with them. I hate them, I hate the Turks, I hate the SOLDIERs, I hate all of them. All of them! Everything connected to this company is rotten to the core!"

"I'm not really a ShinRa fan myself. But they're not all bad," Aerith said, her words slow and careful. "My...my father worked for them. My boyfriend was...is...was a SOLDIER," she said, frowning slightly. "They're not all bad. And..." she trailed off, biting her lip.

She definitely didn't trust Aerith now. She covered it with a faint smile. "Bad breakup or roller coaster or something?"

Aerith smiled, but it didn't seem to reach her eyes. "Something like that. One day he went out on a mission and never came back," she said simply, and the smile fell off Tifa's face as if she'd been slapped.

That hadn't been the answer she was expecting, and something about the way Aerith looked down at her hands, picking nervously at her skirt, told Tifa that at least some part of what Aerith had said had been true - she recognized the way loss, _real_ loss, looked, and it was written all over Aerith.

"I'm sorry," she said, turning red, and Aerith just shook her head.

"It was years ago," she said softly. "Three years ago. One day he left, and just...he never came back."

Tifa's lips quirked up into a smile that held no humor. "Three years ago, eh? There's a coincidence."

Aerith gave her a questioning look, and Tifa continued. "You want to know why I hate ShinRa? Because three years ago, ShinRa troops and SOLDIERs came to my home town and burned it to the ground. They killed almost everyone there. They killed my father," she said, her voice growing softer. "And almost killed me," she said, and unconsciously touched her stomach, where the first of many scars she had gotten from ShinRa was. "And then, they erased everything they had done."

"Oh," Aerith said, almost breathlessly in a gasp. "Oh. I'm so sorry."

"_That's_ why I hate ShinRa. Why I swore to tear them down. But look how I ended up," Tifa said bitterly. Zangan had been right, and it was like a Poison had been cast on her, the way it ran through her veins. "A captured 'terrorist' and now I'm their lab rat."

"The terrorist and the flower seller," Aerith said with a quirk of her lips. "What an odd pair we make."

"But _why_?" Tifa finally burst out with. "Why would they want to experiment on you? On us?"

Aerith didn't say anything for a moment, searching carefully for words. "Have you...have you ever heard of the Cetra? The Ancients?"

Tifa frowned slightly. "Kind of. Aren't they some kind of myth or something?"

Aerith smiled sadly. "No. They weren't. They were real. And I'm the last one. Or the last half one. The last full-blooded Cetra died with my mother. And the only reason I ever saw the outside of a lab in the first place was because my ShinRa scientist father died trying to get us out."

Tifa's eyes went wide. "Oh," she finally said, and then neither one of them said anything for a long time.

.-

_It would seem that while that idiot assigned to work for me can not keep the trigger-happy troopers in line, he has lucked out - insofar as that moron's attempt to break the only intact Nibelheim sample I have on hand may have opened up a new vector for it to imprint on the Ancient sample. Unless he is lying to me, the Ancient used its own abilities to repair the damage done to the N sample. XVIII would still have been in a susceptible state, so it may be more likely to imprint whatever ability XVIII-A used - most likely a Limit Break. I will have to test for this at a later date, however, since it is far too early in the experiments to begin adding variations, and the numbers from the test results the next day may be outliers, as this was only the second day of injections and mako insertions, and the beginning always shows the most variation. However, this is something to keep in mind._

_If nothing else, this may help induce bonding between the two, which can only aid in my results. Provided it is done in a controlled way. I will not have controllable variables introduced wildly and ruin my experiments. Hopefully, the N sample will become docile sooner rather than later, so troopers are no longer necessary. _

_If it does not, however, measures will have to be taken. If worse comes to worse, I suppose I could sever it's spinal column or some other such surgical procedure. I don't need it mobile, after all, just viable. And I still have samples on hand from other subjects, including S - if worse comes to worse and these fools taint my data too much, it could at the very least make a useful incubator._

_Hojo's notes on subject XVIII, p. 42_

.-

The troopers and the scientist came back.

And whenever they came, Tifa didn't fight, for all she still went into a defense stance before she was hit with the Confuse, and Aerith was grateful enough for that.

.-

_"Do you see now, girl," Zangan says sharply. "Do you see with your own eyes what they can do?"_

_"No," Tifa whispers, and falls to her knees at the sight. She had often imagined Nibelheim as it had been before ShinRa and their SOLDIERs came, but this...this... "No, this can't be right, _how_.-" she says, shaking her head furiously in her confusion, unable to believe what her eyes are telling her._

_It is Nibelheim. Nibelheim as it had been, before Sephiroth and the other SOLDIERs came. But...but it's not right; none of the people there are right. She can tell that even from here; her eyes have always been so sharp her father used to say she had dragon eyes, able to spot even a huegelsteiger goat on the side of the mountain from far away. The people there look so much like people who had died, but they aren't, even though they live in houses identical to what had had been there. It has been less than a year, but already, there is no sign of all the destruction of that terrible night. "No."_

_"This is what they do," Zangan says again, but there is no anger in his voice anymore, only sadness. "Nibelheim was never destroyed, no one was killed, and they made your memories a lie. You are the one no longer in step with the reality they have made. This is their power. Your home is a lie, Tifa Lockheart, but they will make you a liar and kill you for it to make that true. Do you see now? So chose. Go back there and live a lie, or disappear and have no past. But the path you're trying to create now will only end with you hunted down and erased. If you want your revenge so badly, stay in the shadows. Wander and strike in the best way you know. But if you attack straight, alone and with rage, screaming about the past they have erased, you will be swatted down. This is the reality that exists now," he said, his voice harsh. "And you must make your peace with this much of it or you will be destroyed."_

_She looks at what had been her home, and the tears begin - but they are not of sadness. They are of rage, so strong and overwhelming that she is shaking because she has no idea what to do with the rawness of it. _

_Her master covers her eyes with a hand, shielding her from it, and guides her away._

.-

It always took Aerith a while to get her bearings, after. It was always a bit like waking from a sleep but still being tired - her brain was sluggish as if it was still half-full of dreams. Or rather, it was more like dreaming while awake; like everything was a little too bright, a little too sharp, a little too hyper-real, even though her brain felt like it was two steps behind.

She didn't know how to possibly describe it. She just knew she didn't like it, any of it, and she never got used to it, even though she'd lost count of how often it had happened.

She sat up, then felt dizzy, as if she had moved too fast, and she steadied herself with one hand on the bed. "Whoa," she said, and shook her head, then looked over at Tifa's bed.

"Tifa? Are you OK? Tifa?" Aerith said, and sighed at her own repetition.

She really should have known the answer by then.

Tifa was _not_ OK.

She always hoped it would be different, but it never was. Whatever it was they were doing to Tifa - whatever it was they were injecting her with - left her in a strange, disquieting blank state that never stopped being unsettling.

Aerith got up and headed over to Tifa's bed. Tifa was lying there like she'd been dumped when they scientists finished with them. Aerith wondered, for a moment, how the scientists and their troopers brought them back - they always walked the two of them into the tank room, and then everything after going in the tank - after the strange jolt of panic at being in the mako, lungs and mind panicking no matter how many times it happened, no matter how much she knew it was ok, that they could breathe the mako somehow and not drown, her body always panicked, at first, and then it was nothing but dreams, and that feeling of dreaming awake when she returned to reality, still smelling of mako and staring up at a gray ceiling.

The scientists walked them down at gunpoint, but how did they bring them back?

It didn't really matter much.

"Tifa," she said softly, and brushed some of Tifa's hair, stiff with dried mako, out of her eyes.

No response.

She wished she had a hair brush.

She sat down next to Tifa on the bed. "Tifa," she said again, a little louder, and nothing.

But she felt something, a tiny spark of something, something bright and different from the tendril of wrong she could also feel, and it always gave her a tiny hope - she suspected that tiny little spark was Tifa, was Tifa coming back, and she always focused on it, and let her voice and her touch, light against Tifa's hair, or her shoulder, or her back, help guide Tifa back.

"Come on, up you go," she said, and pulled Tifa up sitting next to her. Tifa was limp, pliant, and her head fell onto Aerith's shoulder. Aerith put her arm around Tifa and rested her head on top of Tifa's, feeling for that spark, and taking in the warmth of another person and the comfort it brought.

Something in her relaxed, and she realized, feeling almost sick at herself as she did, that she liked this.

She liked Tifa like this better than the constant wariness when she was awake. Liked for a moment not having Tifa sullen and suspicious in one side of the room. Liked being able to care for someone in some small way. These moments, where Tifa was blank instead of wary and distrustful, leaning against her like a helpless child would her mother. The days in between when the scientist would come, Tifa would sometimes say almost nothing at all to her and Aerith always felt too hesitant to even try to break the almost oppressive silence from Tifa after the first few times ended in Tifa abrupt pulling back and going wary, and leaving Aerith feeling more alone and on edge than she could ever remember.

It disturbed her even as she took the small moments of peace; of some kind of safety and contact, and she _hated_ that feeling.

This couldn't go on.

She didn't dare let this go on. She wouldn't let ShinRa turn her into whatever this would make her.

They would talk. When Tifa woke up, Aerith was putting a stop to this, somehow.

_And while we're dreaming_, she thought wryly, then sighed and closed her eyes.

_Later. For now, just...later._

For now, there was this, this moment of quiet without sullenness, without the weight of a distrustful stare.

And the warmth of someone else, and someone to care for, in the only time and only way the other woman would allow herself to be.

She let the time pass quietly, the only sounds that of their breathing, strangely in sync.

Breathing, just breathing, as the world finally settled into normal - as normal as it could be in this place - and went from being too sharp and too slow into normal.

The mako, she knew, did weird things. But she also knew it was the Planet; the very thing that let her able to feel even a little of whatever was happening in Tifa, let her reach for the tiny spark was best she could.

When that feeling of a spark came closer as it also, paradoxically, got harder to sense, she knew it meant Tifa would be waking up soon, something that was a relief as much as part of her that she hated found it a disappointment.

It wasn't just the mako doing funny things to her, she knew.

"Nngh," Tifa let out softly, then took a deep breath.

It was always the same - that faint grunt, then a deep breath. Then this, a moment of confusion before Tifa pulled away.

Always the same, and it always somehow _hurt_, so when Tifa pulled away from her this time, a little too jerkily when Aerith was feeling so raw, and with something so distrustful and suspicious in her eyes, _still_, something in Aerith just _snapped_.

.-

Tifa always hated waking up after whatever mad experiment ShinRa was inflicting on her was over.

She hated the way her head felt, she hated how things felt wrong, and she hated feeling weak. It always took her a while to get her bearings. But she always woke up the same - feeling somehow safe, with Aerith nearby, either sitting on the floor by Tifa's bed, and next to her with either her head on Aerith's lap or with Aerith's arm on her shoulder.

Always waiting for her to wake up, like she was seeing how long it would take, and it was always like this, always - Aerith was always awake before her, and it also seemed so odd that she focused on that and stomped down on any feelings of safety and warmth. It was always every single time, which was not safe, more like it was one more scientist observing her, and.-

The thought hit her uncomfortably, but it would make so much sense, and.-

.-and Aerith was yelling.

Tifa'd never seen her do that, never seen her angry (something that was also far too suspicious for her tastes, but now, all of a sudden, and directed at her, made her eyes go wide with surprise.

"Now look!" Aerith said sharply. "In case you missed it, I'm smelling pretty mako tank fresh myself! They're dumping me in there, same as you!" she yelled. "So quit acting like I'm some ShinRa spy or something! They're doing this to both of us! I don't know why you won't trust anyone, but it's time you started trusting me, because I can't take this any more!" she yelled, and was on her feet, pacing angrily in the small room.

Tifa startled. "What? I.-"

"Stop it!" Aerith yelled, and something in her voice quavered. She gestured around the cell, then at her hand, at the black XVIII-A tattooed on it. "I'm just like you right now! I'm just as trapped and just as scared, and I can't take any of this anymore!" Aerith yelled, then wiped angrily at her eyes. "I just can't!"

If Aerith was acting, she was a good actress. She was shaking, and she balled her hands ands into fists as she bit her lip, as if trying to stop more words from coming out.

Tifa desperately wanted to be able to trust Aerith, to trust someone. But she'd learned, the hard way, that trusting usually just got you slapped in the face.

But she didn't want to be in this alone, whatever it was this was. And she was tired, so tired, of being on edge all the time.

She wrapped her arms around herself tightly, feeling tired and weak - like she should be stronger than this, like she shouldn't be fine staying on guard all the time, shouldn't feel this need she kept stomping on to depend on someone so much. And she hated all of it; hated the feeling and hated having the feeling.

She hated what ShinRa was doing to her...and she realized she hated what they were doing to, and not just because of the experiments.

Maybe Aerith was a spy. Maybe ShinRa was willing to go that deep to get information out of one piddling little terrorist.

Or maybe Aerith had been telling the truth all along, that she was a much a prisoner as Tifa was, and Tifa had been making both of them even more miserable.

She looked up, at Aerith's face, and into her eyes, and they had the same gleam as the SOLDIERs had.

The same gleam her own had, when she looked away and over at the mirror above the sink and saw her own reflection.

Green eyes gleaming like Sephiroth's; brown eyes gleaming like mako pools.

"I don't trust you," Tifa said, her voice small. She looked at her hand, at the black XVIII, and at the XVIII-A on Aerith's, and shut her eyes. "Because I've seen ShinRa wipe out an entire town and then refill it with actors taking dead people's places. That's what they did to my home," she said, biting her lip and still not opening her eyes. "But...I'm not that important, am I? All this. Not even that's big enough for ShinRa to do all this," she said, letting her shoulders drop.

"I don't trust you," she said again, before she looked Aerith in the eyes again. "But I'll try."

.-

Time passed slowly, in the cells. There was little for them to do, besides talk to each other, and wait for the next time the scientists and the troopers came. Tifa still stayed tight-lipped about a lot of her past, and Aerith didn't press it because she had seen those scars, but did her best to fill the silence with stories about when she was little, all the while careful to stay away from anything related to ShinRa. Most of the time, though, it was so quiet Aerith wanted to scream. She hated being cooped up as much as they were, and so far away from life.

She couldn't hear the Planet here, and that silence made the other silence so much worse.

Tifa didn't seem to mind how quiet it was, somehow, and kept herself busy by training.

Aerith had to admit, Tifa had a grace about her when she went through her katas - she did them, now; she'd hesitantly asked Aerith if she could move the beds around so she could practice, and Aerith had been so grateful for that small change she'd agreed. They would move the beds into a corner when she wanted to train and back when she was done, and Aerith would watch her as Tifa, eyes shut, went through her forms.

Tifa'd had training, a good bit of it, and with nothing else to do but exercise most of the time, she'd somehow gotten more muscular than she had been when they arrived. Aerith marveled at Tifa's dedication, and figured it a good thing - if they were ever going to get out, she figured she'd have to do the one charming their way out of the cell, somehow, but it'd be Tifa being in top fighting shape that would give their best shot at getting out of the building.

A little voice sometimes suggested she ought to at least try a push-up or two, then she'd look at her pathetically thin little arms and then Tifa's, and give up before she even started, figuring she didn't need the humiliation on top of everything else. Plus, she didn't want to push it; do anything to upset the fragile trust Tifa seemed to be struggling to give her.

But there was something different about today. Tifa opened her eyes and looked over at Aerith as she was going from a punch to a block. "So," she said, staying in position with one arm up in a block, "You want to just sit there, or you want me to teach you this?"

Aerith's eyes widened slightly in shock. Tifa had never spoken to her when she was working out; only pretended Aerith wasn't there - or rather, tuned her out the way they had both learned to do to have any semblance of privacy.

"You...you don't mind?" Aerith said hesitantly.

"No," Tifa said, shaking her head. She went out of the stance, and gestured for Aerith to come over.

Aerith was glad that day she was wearing the scrub-like clothes they had been given instead of her dress. They only had three outfits each, the clothes they'd been wearing when they came, and two coarse, ill-fitting sets of scrub pants and short, side-tying hospital gown-like shirts. Those two outfits were taken away once a week for laundering and they were given clean ones, but they still kept their clothes from before, as if a reminder there was a world outside of the labs.

Plus, it gave them more to wear, so they could wash their dirty clothes in the sink and let them air dry draped over the beds.

"Stand like this," Tifa said. "This is the basic stance, and all of your power and stability will come from it."

"Like this?" Aerith said, and Tifa shook her head.

"Close. Hunker down a bit more, but keep your back straight and stick your butt out."

Aerith blinked, not at all sure how that was supposed to work. "Okay..." she said, but gamely tried.

"Good!" Tifa said, nodding. "Now put your arms up like this."

.-

Once they got through the basic stance, Tifa told Aerith to make a fist.

She took one look at the fist Aerith made and raised an eyebrow. "You've never fought before, have you?"

Aerith raised her jaw slightly. "I have! I _did_ grow up in the slums. I've had to fight a couple times!"

Tifa smiled, just a little bit. "OK, a different question. You aren't very _good_ at fighting, are you?"

Aerith laughed in spite of herself. "I...no. I was much better at talking my way out of it or running away," she said self-deprecatingly. "And usually I had something on hand if it came down to it. I'm much better with a staff than hand to hand. After all, you could find a good length of pipe anywhere, and if you did, all you have to do is just whack someone over the head with that and take off."

"I always liked getting right up in here," Tifa said. "Show 'em not to underestimate me. Here, make your fist like this, see? The way you're doing it, you could break your thumb."

"Well, that would be counter-productive," Aerith said with a laugh, and mimicked how Tifa had made a fist.

"Punch so you hit with the first two knuckles. Like this," she said, and threw a single, straight punch.

Aerith tried it. Her form was completely wrong and that punch wouldn't have so much as bruised a fly, but it wasn't that bad for what was very clearly a first attempt. "Not bad. But you're too exposed; turn yourself more sideways so you're a smaller target," she added, putting her hands on Aerith's shoulders to position her better. "Right, like that. Now try again. And remember, aim with your first two knuckles, and draw your arm back as you twist, so it's got your weight behind it."

.-

"OK, I'm done, mercy," Aerith panted. She wiped sweat out of her eyes with her arm and winced slightly. "I think my arms are about to fall off."

"Wimp," Tifa said, but she said it with a grin.

"Yes. I am," Aerith said, laughing herself. "I am a stinky, smelly, weak wimp whose arms are about to fall off. I'm so glad we're both on the same page with that."

Tifa laughed. "Get some water. You probably need it."

Aerith nodded, still breathing hard. Tendrils of her bangs were plastered against the side of her face from sweat, and she looked like she was wilting.

"Wait, like this, first," Tifa said, and went into the stance she had first taught Aerith, the base stance. Aerith whimpered, but copied Tifa's stance. Tifa crossed her arms in front of her chest, then brought them back to her sides sharply. Aerith mimicked it.

"Now bow to me," Tifa said, and bowed slightly to Aerith. Aerith copied her again, and Tifa went out of the fighting stance. "OK, _now_ you can go get some water, wimp."

"Water!" Aerith croaked and rushed over to the sink and turned the faucet on, then drank three cups of water one after the other, as fast as she could fill her cup.

Aerith started splashing water on her face, and Tifa turned away when the other woman started to take off her loose, hospital gown-like shirt. There was very little privacy, but they gave each other what they could and just got used to the rest.

Aerith bathed as best she could in the small sink, then washed her shirt and bra, and Tifa thought.

In an odd way, even though it had been on a whim, it was deciding to teach Aerith something of fighting that convinced her that Aerith _didn't_ actually know how to fight. You could hide a lot of things, she knew, and lie about a lot, but your body never lied. That much she knew - you couldn't hide training. If someone had trained, seriously _trained_, how they moved and positioned themselves gave it away as clear as day.

You couldn't pretend not to know what you were doing when something had become a reflex, and Aerith just didn't have those reflexes. Not only that, but if you learned one way of fighting, it tended to bleed over when you started a new one - fighting stances, the way you made a fist, footwork, all of it.

But Aerith didn't have any of that bleedover. None of that muscle memory. And while there was a chance they could have sent someone completely untrained in any kind of fighting style in as a spy...it wasn't likely, not when they knew Tifa could fight as well as she could. It wouldn't have made any sense for a ShinRa spy - a Turk - at all.

But it would make sense for a flower seller who happened to be a half-Ancient snatched up off the streets.

"I'm going to be very sore tomorrow, aren't I?" Aerith said, sounding slightly mournful.

Tifa looked over on instinct. "Probably," she said, and Aerith groaned.

"Oh, well. I needed the exercise anyway. I used to walk around so much," Aerith said as she dried off with a small hand towel. "I do wish they'd let us out to shower more than once a week. My hair could do with a washing now," she said, but gave Tifa a lopsided smile.

"I just want a real bath," Tifa said, giving in just a little. She tried not to talk about things that were out of reach, but it was so hard sometimes.

Aerith let out a longing sigh. "Oh...a bath. A nice, long bath. Hopefully with a lot of hot water."

"And bubbles," Tifa said. "And soap that didn't seem like they got it from some industrial bargain bin."

"Like that shampoo they give us," Aerith said, making a face as she put on her spare shirt.

Tifa made a face. "I had better shampoo when I was out living in the woods for a year and making it out of lichens," she groaned. "I swear, when we get out of here, I am heading for the first hot spring I can find. First one. And not getting out until I'm all wrinkly."

"You can make soap out of lichens?" Aerith said, sounding surprised. "And you know, I've never been to a hot spring." She spread out her wet shirt and bra to dry over the edge of her bed. "I've been to the public baths in the Little Nankyo part of town, but never to a real hot spring."

"They're so wonderful," Tifa said, sighing. "There's this one I went to, there's some kind of mineral in the water, and it just makes your skin so smooth afterwards." She sighed again, just remembering it.

"You'll have to take me to one when we get out of here," Aerith said, and Tifa realized she kind of wanted to, and she wasn't quite sure where that came from.

"Deal," Tifa said, and Aerith gave her a bright smile she couldn't help but return.

Then they both fell silent as Tifa untied her shirt and went over to wash.

Aerith hummed to herself, toying with her nails and offering that bit of privacy as Tifa bathed, and Tifa thought it didn't really matter if she wanted to go with Aerith to a hot spring one day or not.

It was nice to dream, to dream of being free and to dream that they were simply normal girls, friends from who knows where, if only for a little while.

.-

Things fell into a pattern. Every few days, the troopers and scientists would come, and throw a Confuse on Tifa, then inject her with whatever it was they did. Then they would take them away, into an area with mako tanks, and force them into one, and time would stop.

When were put back in their cell, Aerith would usually be all right, after a bit, but Tifa...Tifa would always have that same, glassy stare, with her pupils wide and blown out like she was still Confused, and the faint, wispy tendril of _wrong_ still snaking through her before it faded. While she waited for it to fade, Aerith would often sit by Tifa's bed and talk to her, or sit cradling Tifa, so she at least felt like she was at least doing something. It always seemed to help, somehow.

Then a day after they were returned to their cell, and the next, the scientists and troopers would come again, and take their blood. And then nothing, until the cycle started again.

Tifa had gotten good, most of the time, about not fighting the troopers. But not every time. And not this time, not when it was the one trooper who tended to manhandle her the most.

Aerith was pretty sure Tifa's shoulder dislocated when she tried to throw off the trooper as he was strapping her down into her bed, just before the scientist cursed and hit her with a Confuse, then jammed a needle in her arm that made Tifa go limp.

.-

_"Where were you born?" she asks as they hike. She still tires easily and feels occasional twinges of pain from the time her teacher will not allow her to talk about, and she needs a distraction. And it has become a challenge for her now, to drag from him where he is from, to make him admit that he is from a place that had been.-because if he does, then it means she can remember Nibelheim, that she has the right to remember._

_"The place where my mother was."_

_"And where was that?"_

_"The place where she bore me," her master answers with a smile though he has no mouth, and will say no more._

.-

There was something different this time. Aerith didn't know what it was, but she could tell - that little tendril of _wrong_ inside Tifa after the tanks suddenly gotten a lot more...she wasn't sure. She wasn't sure how to put it into words. Something that was _wrong_ had suddenly gotten a lot _wronger_.

It was as if...it was as if that tendril of _wrong_ she'd always felt snaking around the periphery had suddenly found that tiny spark that was always there hiding, and was trying to grow over it, like ivy choking a plant beneath it.

It scared her in a way she couldn't begin to put into words.

But there was nothing she could do. Nothing beyond what she did now, sit cradling Tifa as she stared out at nothing, trying to coax that spark to burn brighter, trying to bring Tifa back, and waiting.

The silence and the _wrongness_ was crushing her. So she stroked Tifa's hair, and began to talk.

.-

_Things are progressing smoothly with the samples, but I find myself running into outside problems, namely the idiots on my staff. XVIII has again been damaged prior to today's tests. While I do plan introduce injuring them to push XVIII-A to limit breaks to see if it will continue to try to heal XVIII and if that will aid with the imprinting of abilities after genetic splicing has begun, these must be controlled and done in such a way as to intentionally deepen the bond between them. _

_I especially do not want an unforeseen variables to continue to be added in to the testing, since I have begun reinforcing some of the bonding that seems to be happening by introducing Jenova samples into this round of genetic manipulation, first with the sample from N. I will begin introducing Jenova DNA into the Ancient sample once I have finished the comparisons between the parent sample and its own, to finish weeding out the genetic impurities from Gast. This is a delicate task, but the Ancient sample is only half Ancient, so introducing pure genes into both should produce interesting effects, and possibly boost the ability of sample A to bond with XVIII, and vice versa. However, this will inadvertently mean the two of them will undergo the SOLDIER creation process, which can either be a plus (potentially testing the outcome of samples incubated and born from a SOLDIER mother) or a minus (reduce both of them to sniveling husks, or give them the strength to escape)._

_I have ordered their holding areas to be reinforced to withstand SOLDIER-level strength, and I today's mishap finally pushed me into requested the doctor working with the SOLDIERs in Junon I was looking at be transferred here to assist me to replace the idiot I'm firing once I jump through these ridiculous hoops and the transfer request goes through. _

_I am requesting Dr. L for three reasons: a) she is female, so I suspect she will have a gentler touch with my samples, b) her files note that she is good with handling the more difficult SOLDIERs, i.e., the ones who have ended up unsatisfactory for various reasons and have been sent to the facilities in Junon, so she should be able to control both the troopers AND the samples, and c) being military-trained, all of her reports on the SOLDIERs she has treated are meticulously detailed and she seems to have an eye for noticing small changes, which could be invaluable at this stage. Once everything is in place in a month or so, I should have adequate baseline data and will be ready to proceed._

_Pity she's a bit past her prime, though. Would have been nice to have a pretty young thing about again._

_Hojo's notes on XVIII, pg. 169_

.-

"When I was a little girl," Aerith said softly, "my mother bought me this big set of crayons. It had all these colors. I just loved it," she began. She didn't know if Tifa could really hear her or not, but that didn't seem to be important. She couldn't just sit there, in that preternatural and eerie stillness. She needed to say something, needed to interact with Tifa in some kind of way. "One day, I decided the paper I was coloring on just wasn't big enough, and I'd make the whole wall pretty," she said with a faint smile at the memory. "So I drew flowers all over the walls. And when my mother got home...oh, she was so mad at me!" Aerith laughed at that, and rested her head against the top of Tifa's for a moment. "She told me if I wanted flowers around, I had better go grow them myself, not draw them on the wall! And then she brought out a bucket of soapy water and a rag and made me scrub the whole thing down. It took me forever! Then she took my crayons away for two days! I was so mad!

"But you know," she said with a faint sigh, "There was one place that just never got clean. No matter how hard I scrubbed, there was one flower that never quite came clean. Even now, there are still traces of it on the wall and Mom just shakes her head at it and tells me what a silly child I was.

"When we get out of here," Aerith said, "I'll show it to you. Maybe you know a way to get that crayon off the wall," she said.

She fell silent, but hugged Tifa tightly. "I promise you'll get to see it one day. That and the flowers I grew instead of drawing on the walls," she finished, and hoped someday that it would be true. "We'll escape from this place, and find the Promised Land my mother told me about."

She would get them out. Somehow, she would get them out.

She'd do what her mother had told her, so long ago, and she'd get them out.

.-

End Part 2

.-

_What's at the core of my existence isn't 'nothingness.' It's not that desolate, arid place. _

_-Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Book 2_


End file.
